Revivals Victorian, Gothic and Civic

NEWBURGH, N.Y. — As Hannah Brooks drove down Liberty Street, she felt the magnetic pull of this city 60 miles north of Manhattan, with its Hudson River views, its architectural masterpieces and its shocking decay. “You drive through these damaged areas and you find pockets of these amazing buildings,” said Ms. Brooks, who was at the time a resident of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “You can see that they’re crying out to be saved.”

She decided to do just that. Ms. Brooks joined dozens of former New Yorkers who in recent years have decamped for Newburgh, hoping to rescue one of New York State’s most notorious cities by way of architectural restoration.

Restoring, it needs. Newburgh was George Washington’s Revolutionary War headquarters; that 18th-century farmhouse still stands in the center of town. Later it was the stamping ground of the 19th century’s version of today’s “starchitects,” including Andrew Jackson Downing and his disciples, like Calvert Vaux and Frederick Clarke Withers. Their work — grand Second Empire Victorian, Gothic revival and Queen Anne houses — is everywhere.

But the city succumbed to a panoply of 20th-century ills: deindustrialization; urban renewal, which claimed a third of the city’s older homes and detached the city from its waterfront; and the creation of the Newburgh-Beacon bridge, which replaced the ferry as the main mode of transport across the river and took visitors around the city rather than through it. Now, more than a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Blight is ubiquitous, pockmarking the streetscape between renovated homes, and the city has a well-known gang and drug problem.

“It has a grittiness and an elegance,” said Robert Fontaine Jr., an actor and director from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who bought and rehabbed a house on one of Newburgh’s more infamous blocks last year. “There’s so much beauty and so much decay, and so much potential.”

The most direct route to that potential, many believe, is through the city’s affordable architecture. Fixer-uppers can sell for as little as $30,000, and renovated Victorian homes with Hudson River views can be had for $200,000. One nonprofit group markets the city as “Like Brooklyn, but affordable.”

Newburgh is reminiscent of that borough in its urban fabric, with its dense pockets of rowhouses and its racially diverse population. But it is perhaps the only city vying for the title of “the next Brooklyn” that likens itself more to 1980s Brooklyn than the current incarnation, with its locavore restaurants and multimillion-dollar condos.

“When we moved to Brooklyn 30 years ago, there were drug dealers down the street,” said Judy Johnson, who, with her partner, Terri Vargas, bought a 5,600-square-foot Victorian designed by Calvert Vaux in Newburgh in 2001. That old Brooklyn street: Prospect Park West.

Sherry Ou-yang, a family therapist who had been living in Ditmas Park in Brooklyn, first saw a foreclosed Second Empire Victorian house in Newburgh listed online for $199,000. It was too expensive then, but when the price dropped to $35,000 in 2009, she bought it from the bank; by then, it was in serious disrepair, mirroring the decay around it. “We saw that we could really make a difference in this community, just through fixing a house,” she said.

Pioneering in real estate can be morally ambiguous, benefiting homeowners who score a bargain and, in many cases, who profit from a previous owner’s grief. But Newburgh has at least 700 vacant buildings, inflating property taxes; the more taxpaying homeowners there are, the lower the taxes for everyone.

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A historic house designed by the architect Andrew Jackson Downing.CreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times

“The people who are moving in are helping because they’re putting more properties on the tax roll,” said Deirdre Glenn, a lifelong Newburgher and former executive director of the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity, which has built 72 neo-Victorian homes for low-income families in some of Newburgh’s most challenged areas. She noted that it can be hard to get homeowner’s insurance or sell a house when the surrounding properties are abandoned. “Newburgh was really depressing and very run-down and very rough and at times threatening,” Ms. Glenn said. “It’s wonderful to see people caring about their houses again.”

This is not just gentrification, say longtime Newburghers as well as the newcomers. The new arrivals are not replacing lifelong residents to open artisanal mayonnaise shops; instead they are joining the community. Decora Sandiford, a hip-hop artist who moved from Brownsville, Brooklyn, to Newburgh in 2005, said his block had 13 abandoned properties when he moved; now there are three, the others having been renovated by residents of diverse classes, races and sexual orientations. “It’s not just developers or just middle-class white people buying these houses — it’s black people and Latino people, and they might not even be middle-class,” he said. Mr. Sandiford said that fixing up properties forces neighbors to stop dumping their garbage on the sites. “It makes everyone stay on top of their game,” he said.

Though many people in Newburgh are happy to see the abandoned buildings restored, some are skeptical about the impact on the city’s entrenched problems, including its lack of industry and its continuing battle against drugs and gangs.

“It’s great that the houses are getting fixed up,” said Kendrick Robinson, a lifelong resident. “But they have to do something about the crime, the transportation and the jobs.”

No one disagrees with him. But many Newburghers say the city’s biggest obstacle is its reputation. They say people conflate the look of the city with its safeness, and note that the violent crime is limited, targeted and geographically condensed. “There are some rough parts of the city, there are no two ways about that,” Mayor Judy Kennedy said. “I wouldn’t be down on Benkard Avenue at midnight, but if you’re not part of the drug culture, you’ll be fine.”

She said Newburgh was cracking down on absentee landlords and offering grants and tax breaks for renovating older properties to aid the city’s recovery.

Businesses are also moving in, including the Newburgh Brewing Company, which opened in 2012 in a 20,000-square-foot former steam engine factory and employs 20 local workers. “People who’ve never been to the city think there’s bullets flying everywhere, but we’ve never had a single incident of crime or violence in or near the brewery,” said Paul Halayko, the chief operating officer. He and his business partner, Christopher Basso, chose to relocate here from the city for the cost as well as the cause. “We put the name Newburgh in 500 restaurants across the state, and it’s now associated with good beer, not violence,” Mr. Basso said. “We’re helping to re-brand the city.”

Atlas Industries, a high-end-furniture company, relocated from Gowanus, Brooklyn, in 2012. For the price of two years’ rent in Brooklyn, its owners bought a 55,000-square-foot waterfront warehouse and now lease space to former New York artisans, including a furniture designer and a glass artist. Also new to the city: a theater company, a movie theater, a concert series and a food co-op.

Many of the newcomers are also involved at the grass-roots level. Mr. Sandiford has worked with local youth organizations and helped start three community gardens. Ms. Brooks and her neighbors purchased an abandoned building on their block and restored it. Mr. Fontaine helped open a film commission office to encourage the film industry to use Newburgh as a double for Brooklyn; he calls the city “the other borough.”

“There’s such a social scene,” said Ms. Johnson, who has sat on the boards of three nonprofits; her partner, Ms. Vargas, has sat on the boards of two. “This town needs so much on every front that there are fund-raisers practically every weekend.”

Whether their efforts or the influx of artists, small businesses and home restorers, who together employ a few hundred people, can make up for Newburgh’s huge losses seems doubtful to some. “The loss of industry was in the thousands and thousands of skilled workers,” said Johanna Porr, a lifelong Newburgher and director of the Historical Society of Newburgh Bay and the Highlands, who has seen at least two waves of do-gooders grow fatigued from the battle to save the city. She called the efforts to save Newburgh “the forlorn hope,” a military term for a band of soldiers on the front line of a perilous mission where the chance of casualties is high.

But Ms. Porr said that this time, Newburgh might actually be close to the tipping point. “Nobody buys a house in Newburgh because they want to flip it,” she said. “They do it because they want to save the city.”

Correction:Nov. 9, 2013

An earlier version of a caption misidentified the architect of a historic home shown. It was Andrew Jackson Downing, not Robert Downing.

Correction:Nov. 15, 2013

An earlier version of the correction about the historic home misidentified the architect as Andrew Jackson Downing. It was Calvert Vaux, in following a style established by Mr. Downing.

Correction:Nov. 17, 2013

An article in some editions last Sunday about efforts to revive Newburgh, N.Y., misstated the given name and the surname of a lifelong Newburgh resident and former executive director of the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. She is Deirdre Glenn, not Deborah Glann. And an accompanying picture caption misstated the name of a company that recently opened in the city. It is the Newburgh Brewing Company, not the Newburgh Brewery.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MB6 of the New York edition with the headline: Revivals Victorian, Gothic and Civic. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe